Rodney Gibb will miss the opening round of the 2019 series as he develops the ZT 520 that he debuted last year so he can come back stronger.
Gibb’s ZT 520 was imported from Scotland early in 2018 and was campaigned for part of the season last year but had to deal with a number of reliability issues which caused a lot of frustration for Gibb. The car suffered driveline issues for most of the year and Gibb has begun a extensive rebuild in the hope he can come back and challenge for a top 5 result.
“We had a lot of issues, some of them still unresolved but we have taken the chance to go over a few other things in the hope to eradicate some frustration from last year” commented Gibb.
Some of the updates include electronics in the car, “the car has been built in a way and to a set of regulations which was fine but over here we have some freedoms to support reliability and it’s a no brainer to just update the car and future proof it a bit” said Gibb.
The car will feature the latest MoTeC dash as well as a PDM update, “there is a lot of updates and changes inside, the PDM will remove a lot of wiring and fuses inside the car and the dash will give me every bit of data I can need and that takes us to the next step in this cars development” which will lead hopefully to Gibb challenging the Open V8 field.
The car will also get an engine refresh that will hopefully see some better performance over the remainder of 2019, “we seem to be lacking horsepower, It was quite noticeable and we have done everything outside the engine, a new exhaust and all associated changes still didn’t make a change so we have taken the step to pull the engine out and check what’s right and wrong inside. Hopefully we find something and can push forward for the rest of 2019” Gibb confirmed.
The ZT 520 will return at Phillip Island for round 2 before a campaign for the remainder of 2019 will include Sydney Motorsport Park.